Bad At Sports

This week: Brian and Patricia are joined by sound artist and Machine Project collaborator Chris Kallmyer to sit down with PAULINE OLIVEROS on the eve of her performance at the UC Berkeley Art Museum. Oliveros is a revered figure in contemporary American music. Her career spans fifty years of boundary dissolving music making. In the '50s she was part of a circle of iconoclastic composers, artists, poets gathered together in San Francisco. Recently awarded the John Cage award for 2012 from the Foundation of Contemporary Arts, Oliveros is Distinguished Research Professor of Music at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, and Darius Milhaud Artist-in-Residence at Mills College. Oliveros has been as interested in finding new sounds as in finding new uses for old ones --her primary instrument is the accordion, an unexpected visitor perhaps to musical cutting edge, but one which she approaches in much the same way that a Zen musician might approach the Japanese shakuhachi.     Pauline Oliveros' life as a compos